Between 1981 and 1982, Jean Dubuffet produced 500 small paintings on paper, later titled Psycho-sites. These works depict indeterminate places inhabited by unspecific characters. In Site avec 2 personnages, as in the entire series, forms are blurred and decomposed, and the spatial relationships between elements are erratic, creating a composition charged with disordered tension. Figures with primitive contours float in abstract space.

Dubuffet described them as “ideas of characters who populate ideas of sites ... an enterprise aimed at escaping [the reasonable], at freeing the figuration and hence the vision.” For him, the Psycho-sites were not depictions of real places but “something more abstract, no more than the notion of place, without specificity of any kind.” He emphasized that both sites and figures lacked fixed identity, noting that the characters were “disproportionate, contributing to the ambiguity of the space in which they evolve.”

At the heart of the series lies a questioning of perception itself. Dubuffet believed that “we are mistaken when we identify reality with the vision that we think we have of things,” since what we call realism merely reproduces conventions “our conditioning makes us believe we are seeing.” The Psycho-sites, made hastily and with “precipitated execution,” embrace indetermination and ambiguity to evoke “a strengthening of the mental state, more than the physical one.” Ultimately, they rest on his conviction “that there is no basis for differentiating between a site considered real and a phantom … all that we believe to see being always and in all cases an arbitrary production of the spirit.”